Intermittent laggy mouse

[Blerticus]

One fairly intermittent issue I'm running into.

Every-so-often, the mouse gets "laggy/stuttery". Once that happens, here are some symptoms:

• "sysmond" and/or "kernel_task" are running at a "high percentage", sometimes way over 100% (Activity Monitor)
• Activity Monitor's "CPU Window" show one or two of the 8 CPUs running at close to 100%, but the other CPUs bounce anywhere from 0% to 15% (ish)
• If I "shutdown" the computer at that point, it goes through the shutdown motions, but then ends up restarting instead
• Restarting temporarily fixes the problem

When this initially happened, I thought it might be related to USB Ports. I then noticed that I was running with all 26 ports enabled! So, I re-followed @RehabMan's guide to create a custom SSDT (https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-creating-a-custom-ssdt-for-usbinjectall-kext.211311/) (It turns out that when I had initially done this, I had missed a step which resulted in all the ports being injected)

Once I rectified this and limited the port number to 14, it seemed to address the issue.

Unfortunately, over the weekend, this is acting up again.

Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this would be much appreciated.
I have attached the resulting debug files from "gen_debug".

Could this be a "sleep" issue?

Thanks for all your help/suggestions.

-- Mark

 

[UtterDisbelief]

One fairly intermittent issue I'm running into.

Every-so-often, the mouse gets "laggy/stuttery". Once that happens, here are some symptoms:

• "sysmond" and/or "kernel_task" are running at a "high percentage", sometimes way over 100% (Activity Monitor)
• Activity Monitor's "CPU Window" show one or two of the 8 CPUs running at close to 100%, but the other CPUs bounce anywhere from 0% to 15% (ish)
• If I "shutdown" the computer at that point, it goes through the shutdown motions, but then ends up restarting instead
• Restarting temporarily fixes the problem

When this initially happened, I thought it might be related to USB Ports. I then noticed that I was running with all 26 ports enabled! So, I re-followed @RehabMan's guide to create a custom SSDT (https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-creating-a-custom-ssdt-for-usbinjectall-kext.211311/) (It turns out that when I had initially done this, I had missed a step which resulted in all the ports being injected)

Once I rectified this and limited the port number to 14, it seemed to address the issue.

Unfortunately, over the weekend, this is acting up again.

Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this would be much appreciated.
I have attached the resulting debug files from "gen_debug".

Could this be a "sleep" issue?

Thanks for all your help/suggestions.

-- Mark

Hi there. I was looking through this problem - and then realised I didn't know: wired USB mouse or bluetooth mouse using a bluetooth USB adapter?

 

[Blerticus]

Thanks for your response.

It seems to not make any difference if the mouse is bluetooth (Razer Orochi) or wired (Razer Naga / generic HP)

Thanks,

-- Mark

 

[Blerticus]

Another thing I just noticed:

If I enable WiFi, the symptom occurs.
I have the recommended Fenvi FV-T919 installed, connected to an internal USB header (IORegistryExplorer shows it at HS12)

Could this be the culprit? If so, any thoughts on how to troubleshoot and address the issue?

Note: disabling WiFi does not seem to fix it.
Note 2: When I refer to "enable WiFi" and "disable WiFi", I simply mean clicking on the WiFi icon in the menu bar and toggling it on and off.

Alternatively, I've seen lots of discussion on power management and sleep issues. Could that tie into this issue?

Thanks,

-- Mark

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Another thing I just noticed:

If I enable WiFi, the symptom occurs.
I have the recommended Fenvi FV-T919 installed, connected to an internal USB header (IORegistryExplorer shows it at HS12)

Could this be the culprit? If so, any thoughts on how to troubleshoot and address the issue?

Note: disabling WiFi does not seem to fix it.
Note 2: When I refer to "enable WiFi" and "disable WiFi", I simply mean clicking on the WiFi icon in the menu bar and toggling it on and off.

Alternatively, I've seen lots of discussion on power management and sleep issues. Could that tie into this issue?

Thanks,

-- Mark

I think it's unlikely the HS12 port and how it is configured would cause the stuttering mouse or high CPU activity. The only problem you might have connected with the header is no bluetooth at all or instant wake from sleep.

I also doubt the Fenvi card is at fault.

Stuttering mouse is more likely caused by poor antenna positioning. The Fenvi card comes with screw-on antenna. If these are hidden behind a metal PC case the signal gets weakened. See this guide for assistance by @jaymonkey .

Having said that, it is possible a process is hogging available CPU resources, but wow, that would be a serious application to deny a mouse it's meagre time on the processor.

More work on tracking down that CPU craziness required I feel. I would doubt it was errant power-management either, given your stated components, because the system is not unusual and most similar systems may need tweaking but aren't so crippled. Are you running any other software in the background that might be the culprit? It's all there in Activity Monitor. I'm sure you realise this but ... For example as I write this the two main processes running for me are Safari and iTunes as I listen to music. Easy spot. Kernel_task and WindowServer the most disk activity. Memory = Kernel_task and Safari. Nothing big going on.

 

[macs_forever]

Thanks for your response.

It seems to not make any difference if the mouse is bluetooth (Razer Orochi) or wired (Razer Naga / generic HP)

Thanks,

-- Mark

Last time I had a problem like this it was a bad wire in my wired mouse. Do you have a logitech dongle/mouse to try?

 

[Blerticus]

Thank you for all your responses. They are appreciated.

As I mentioned earlier, the kind of mouse doesn't seem to matter: wired, bluetooth, Razer, Apple, HP -- tried them all. ;-)

When this happens, Activity monitor usually shows the "kernel_task" using over 100% CPU (often way higher). Sometimes it's "sysmond". But, no other tasks.

That said, I may have discovered the culprit: Razer's Synapse application and it's associated mouse & keyboard drivers.

Two days ago I completely uninstalled all the Razer software and I have not experienced this issue.
(This isn't "proof-positive" yet, so I'm only "cautiously-optimistic". )

If I don't run into this issue over the weekend, possibly longer, I'll post additional comments here.

Side note: is there any way to get an idea of where "kernel_task" and/or "sysmond" are bogging down? I could see a poorly written kext causing issues (which may have been what happened here). It'd be nice to have a utility called "Kernel Activity Monitor" to see where it's spending its time. Though, I'm sure a tool like that would really bog down the kernel while it's being used.

Thanks,

-- Mark

 

[Blerticus]

One more update: sleep (and waking back up!) seem to be working now, as well.

-- Mark